The email sent out last month by Laurie Zoloth, director of Jewish Studies
at San Francisco State University, was chilling on its face.

"I cannot fully express what it feels like to have to walk across campus
daily, past maps of the Middle East that do not include Israel, past posters
of cans of soup with labels on them of drops of blood and dead babies,
labeled 'canned Palestinian children meat, slaughtered according to
Jewish rites under American license,' past poster after poster calling out
Zionism=racism, and Jews=Nazis," she wrote -- and the details only
became more shattering from then on.

I read Zoloth's words with horror but not, alas, complete amazement,
Eleven years ago, during the Gulf War, across San Francisco Bay, the
head of a student splinter group at Berkeley addressed a room full of
faculty and students opposed to the war, spitting out venomously, "You
Jews, I know your names, I know where you live."

The faculty and students in attendance sat stiffly and said nothing.
Embarrassed? Frightened? Or worse -- thinking that it wasn't time to
tackle this issue, that it was off the agenda, an inconvenience.

Far more recently, two students of mine at NYU wondered aloud whether
it was actually true, as they had heard, that 4,000 Jews didn't show up
for work at the World Trade Center on September 11. They clearly
thought this astoundingly crazy charge was plausible enough to warrant
careful investigation, but it didn't occur to them to look at the names of the
dead.

Wicked anti-Semitism is back. The worst crackpot notions that circulate
through the violent Middle East are also roaming around America, and if
that wasn't bad enough, students are spreading the gibberish. Students!
As if the bloc to which we have long looked for intelligent dissent has
decided to junk any pretense of standards.

A student movement is not just a student movement. It's a student
movement. Students, whether they are progressive or not, have the
responsibility of knowing things, of thinking and discerning, of studying. A
student movement should maintain the highest of standards, not ape the
formulas of its elders or outdo them in virulence.

It should therefore trouble progressives everywhere that the students at
San Francisco State are neither curious nor revolted by the anti-Semitic
drivel they are regurgitating. The simple fact that a student movement --
even a small one -- has been reduced to reflecting the hatred spewed by
others should profoundly trouble anyone whose moral principles aim
higher than simple nationalism -- as should be the case for anyone on the
left.

It isn't hard to discover the sources of the drivel being parroted by the
students at San Francisco State. In the blood-soaked Middle East of
Yasser Arafat and Ariel Sharon, in the increasingly polarized Europe of
Jean-Marie le Pen raw anti-Semitism has increasingly taken the place of
intelligent criticism of Israel and its policies.

Even as Laurie Zoloth's message flew around the world, even as several
prominent European papers published scathing but warranted attacks on
Israel's stonewalling of an inquiry into the Jenin fighting, the great
Portuguese novelist Jose Saramago was describing Israel's invasion of
Ramallah as "a crime comparable to Auschwitz."

In one of his long, lapping sentences, Saramago wrote in Madrid's El Pais
(as translated by Paul Berman in The Forward, May 24):

"Intoxicated mentally by the messianic dream of a Greater Israel which
will finally achieve the expansionist dreams of the most radical Zionism;
contaminated by the monstrous and rooted 'certitude' that in this
catastrophic and absurd world there exists a people chosen by God and
that, consequently, all the actions of an obsessive, psychological and
pathologically exclusivist racism are justified; educated and trained in the
idea that any suffering that has been inflicted, or is being inflicted, or will
be inflicted on everyone else, especially the Palestinians, will always be
inferior to that which they themselves suffered in the Holocaust, the
Jews endlessly scratch their own wound to keep it bleeding, to make it
incurable, and they show it to the world as if it were a banner."

Note well: the deliciously deferred subject of this sentence is: "the Jews."
Not the right-wing Jews, the militarist Israelis, but "the Jews." Suddenly
the Jews are reduced to a single stick-figure (or shall we say
hook-nosed?) caricature and we are plunged into the brainless, ruinous,
abysmal iconography that should make every last reasonable person
shudder.

The German socialist August Bebel once said that anti-Semitism was "the
socialism of fools." What we witness now is the progressivism of fools. It
is a recrudescence of everything that costs the left its moral edge. And,
appallingly, it is this contemptible message the anti-Semitic students at San
Francisco State chose to parrot.

We are not on the brink of "another Auschwitz," and to think so, in fact,
falsifies the danger. The danger is clear and present, though not
apocalyptic. It's no remote nightmare that synagogues are bombed,
including the one on the Tunisian island of Djerba, famous for tolerance,
an apparent al-Qaeda truck bomb attack. This happened. It is no remote
nightmare that hundreds of Palestinian civilians died during Israeli
incursions into the West Bank. This, too, happened. The nightmare is that
the second is being allowed to excuse and justify the first.

Laurie Zoloth wrote: "Let me remind you that ours is arguably one of the
Jewish Studies programs in the country most devoted to peace, justice
and diversity since our inception."

But anti-Semitism doesn't care. Like every other lunacy that diminished
human brains are capable of, anti-Semitism already knows what it hates.

This is no incidental issue, no negligible distraction. A Left that cares for
the rights of humanity cannot cavalierly tolerate the systematic abuse of
any people -- whatever you think of Israel's or any other country's foreign
policy. Any student movement worthy of the name must face the ugly
history that long made anti-Semitism the acceptable racism, face it and
break from it.

If fighting it unremittingly is not a "progressive" cause, then what kind of
progress does progressivism have in mind? What do you think?

================

Todd Gitlin is a professor of journalism, culture, and sociology at New
York University and the author of many books on media and society,
including "Media Unlimited".